Thursday, June 14, 2012

Seeing is believing

A photo showing a foetus whose mother was forced to have an abortion has shocked China web users.

Feng Jiamei, from Shaanxi province, was made to undergo the procedure in the seventh month of pregnancy, local officials said after investigating.

Ms Feng was forced into the abortion as she could not pay the fine for having a second child, US-based activists said. ...

Internet users expressed outrage.

"This is what they say the Japanese devils and Nazis did. But it's happening in reality and it is by no means the only case... They [the officials] should be executed," one reader on news website netease.com said, according to the AFP news agency.

BEIJING – Feng Jianmei says she was manhandled by seven people, some of them local family planning officials, some of whom she didn’t know.

Feng, 22 years old and seven months pregnant, was dragged out of her relative’s home, carried and shoved into a van that headed straight to a hospital on June 2, she told NBC News in phone interview.

She was blindfolded, thrown on a bed, and forced to sign a document that she couldn’t read with the blindfold still on her eyes. Then two shots were injected into her belly. Thirty hours later, on the morning June 4, she gave birth to a dead baby girl.

Feng is one of the many Chinese women who have been forced to have abortions under China’s strict one-child-only policy started in late 1970s to contain the country’s fast growing population, which has now topped 1.3 billion people.

One wonders how vociferously the Obama administration, ever eager to rise to defend abortion on demand, will challenge this atrocity. When will people on the fence finally open their eyes to the horrors of abortion? What will it take?